Handel's Orlando
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INDEPENDENT OPERA presents Handel’s Orlando Saturday 21 June 2008, 7pm Wigmore Hall Welcome Messages from Independent Opera It gives me great pleasure to welcome Independent Opera to INDEPENDENT OPERA at Sadler’s Wells was created in 2005 Wigmore Hall. I salute this valuable young organisation and all to provide a London performance platform for talented young it has achieved over such a short timescale. directors, designers, singers and others involved in the staging and performance of opera. We are delighted to partner with Independent Opera for the Wigmore Hall / Independent Opera Voice Fellowship and Building on the success of our first two productions, I applaud the pioneering work of Independent Opera’s INDEPENDENT OPERA Artist Support was launched in 2007. extensive fellowship programme as well as its commitment to This is a comprehensive programme of fellowships and a wide range of repertoire. scholarships designed to help promising young artists in the period immediately after their formal education ends. It funds I hope that you enjoy tonight’s performance of Orlando. singing lessons, coaching sessions and other activities that will help them make their way professionally. Our partnership with Wigmore Hall is particularly rewarding and provides a fellowship for a singer intent on pursuing a career in both opera and song. We welcome enquiries from individuals interested in sponsoring a fellowship. More information about Artist Support can be found at the back of this programme. John Gilhooly Director We hope you enjoy this evening’s performance of musical Wigmore Hall extracts from our 2006 production of Orlando. Anna Gustafson Director of Operations & Chief Executive, Artist Support INDEPENDENT OPERA at Sadler’s Wells Honorary Patrons It is with great pleasure that we present this performance DENT O EN PE Laurence Cummings EP R of Orlando at Wigmore Hall tonight. Our sell-out 2006 D A N a I t Michael Grandage production of Orlando in the intimate setting of the Lilian S a Wasfi Kani OBE d Baylis Theatre, Sadler’s Wells, prompted us to revive this l e Nicholas Payne r rarely performed music in a concert venue. ’ s W e l l Trustees s In order to adapt this work to a concert format, we have Annita Bennett focused on the arias and ensembles and have omitted most Judith Bollinger of the recitative. However, in order to ensure narrative Nigel Carrington continuity, we have provided in this programme a synopsis Wilson Kerr running alongside the libretto. Founding Patrons Judith Bollinger William Bollinger Alessandro Talevi Artistic Director 2008 INDEPENDENT OPERA at Sadler’s Wells www.independentopera.com Future Dates 18, 20, 22 November 2008 Registered Charity no. 1117559 Sadler’s Wells, Lilian Baylis Theatre: Pelléas et Mélisande Orlando (1733) By George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) Libretto by the composer Adapted from Carlo Sigismondo Capece’s L’Orlando After Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso Cast Orlando William Towers Angelica Rebecca Ryan Medoro Christopher Ainslie Dorinda Martene Grimson Zoroastro Nicholas Warden Orchestra Harpsichord & Conductor Gary Cooper Violins Albrecht Kuehner, Madeleine Easton, Bojan Ciˇci´c,ˇ George Crawford, Camilla Scarlett Viola Louise Hogan Cello Tim Smedley Double bass Sarah Halpin Oboes Kate Latham, Sarah Humphrys Bassoon Lizbeth Elliott Theorbo Matthew Wadsworth Horns Nicholas Benz, Richard Lewis Presented by INDEPENDENT OPERA at Sadler’s Wells Director of Operations & Chief Executive, Artist Support Anna Gustafson Artistic Director Alessandro Talevi Saturday 21 June 2008, 7pm Wigmore Hall The first performance of Orlando was given at the King’s Theatre in London on 27 January 1733. There were ten performances but it was not revived thereafter. The first modern British production was at the Unicorn Theatre, Abingdon, on 6 May 1959. Would patrons please ensure that mobile phones are switched off. Please stifle coughing as much as possible and ensure that watch alarms and any other electronic devices which may become audible are switched off. The life and times of Handel’s Orlando Stephen Pettitt or one reason or another, the world of opera has venue had become available – the new theatre at Covent F always been a world of debate, of politicking, Garden, established by none other than John Rich, who of fashions, of intrigue. That was as true in the early had produced John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, which satirised 17th century as it is true in the early 21st century, when the fashion for Italian opera, in 1728 at the New Theatre, the comparative fortunes of English National Opera and Lincoln’s Inn. Handel seized the chance to transfer his the Royal Opera House provide endless opportunity for operatic operations there. He was not to be beaten. journalistic observation, speculation and (let’s be honest) pure inventiveness. In the London of 1732 there was And indeed, commercial considerations aside, neither certainly a spirit of controversy in the operatic air. It was the attraction of writing oratorio, nor the threat of opera centred on one man, George Frideric Handel, who’d held in the vernacular, nor the prospect of the Opera of the sway as the master of London’s operatic scene since the Nobility had quelled Handel’s appetite for composing first performance of Rinaldo back in 1711. opera in Italian – quite the contrary, in fact. In the decade after 1732 he was to write another dozen such pieces, Handel was clearly up to something. Early in 1732 there culminating with Deidamia in 1741. He wrote Orlando, had been three staged performances of his English masque to a libretto adapted (maybe by himself) from Carlo Esther, written 14 years before, in the large meeting room Sigismondo Capece’s 1711 libretto after Ariosto’s at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand. But on 2 drama, at characteristically break-neck speed during the May the work was given in a greatly expanded form at the first three weeks of November 1732, finishing the score King’s Theatre, Haymarket, where Handel’s Royal Academy on the 20th of that month. of Music company was the leaseholder. The advertisement in The Daily Journal reported that “There will be no Action Besides being what one might consider the first of on the Stage, but the House will be fitted up in a decent Handel’s late operatic masterpieces, Orlando is one Manner, for the Audience. The music to be disposed after of a sequence of “magic” operas whose predecessors the Manner of the Coronation Service.” Thus Handel gave include Rinaldo and Teseo. While it is true that its birth to English oratorio. arias are still predominantly in the da capo, A-B-A format of opera seria – though Orlando himself has only Often it’s assumed that this was the action of a man three arias so structured – the work also shows a new who knew that he was under threat and needed to take sense of continuity, with short aria forms, a number of new directions. After all, now his company found itself accompanied recitatives, and a flexible use of ensembles. with rivals, just across the road. The Arnes – father and In Handel’s hands what is often seen as the rather son, both called Thomas – and John Lampe were staging rigid mould of Metastasian opera was being radically English opera at the Little Haymarket Theatre. Conscious re-shaped. The “Mad Scene” at the end of Act Two is a of the fact that Handel was haemorrhaging a large part good example. It follows a 17th-century tradition by being of his audience to the place on the other side of the constructed as a series of apparently unrelated episodes. street, Handel’s friend, the playwright and sometime But there is something else. Besides including a few theatre manager (and co-librettist for Rinaldo) Aaron Hill, notorious bars in quintuple time, as Orlando imagines prevailed upon him in a letter of 5 December 1732 to try himself descending into Hades, there’s also a recurrent his own hand at writing English opera, “to deliver us from Gavotte-like passage that symbolises Orlando’s struggle our Italian bondage”. Handel did not reply. to retain his mind – a neat musically unifying device that serves a psycho-dramatic purpose. Before long, the Little Haymarket Theatre’s activities would not be Handel’s only competition. In 1732 the idea of Sir John Hawkins, in his A General History of the Science setting up a rival Italian opera company to Handel’s was and Practice of Music (1776), opines that in Handel’s already being mooted. This new company, to be known as the post-1728 operas “it is a matter of some difficulty” Opera of the Nobility, was financed by a young aristocracy at to find a good aria. We can hardly comprehend such a whose head was the notoriously profligate Frederick, Prince remark today. Handel’s music in the 1730s does indeed of Wales. The composer Nicola Porpora was what we might undergo a change. But far from being a lessening of his call its artistic director. The reasons for creating the Opera of powers it is rather a deepening. Orlando, in fact, is the the Nobility project were surely in large part political. Some, first of a stream of works which include his other two no doubt, felt that Handel’s power over London’s opera scene operas drawn from Ariosto, Ariodante and Alcina, as well undermined the status of the aristocracy, which was used to as Arianna, Tamerlano and Rodelinda that can all now pulling the cultural strings all over the civilised world. (It was be comfortably and confidently labelled as masterpieces. to be another half-century before Mozart “invented”, as it As is so often the case with Handel, Orlando’s appeal were, the concept of the freelance composer.) to us rests on the fact that it is an opera about the human psyche.